Health care providers, during examinations and procedures, need additional lighting to better diagnose and treat different health conditions. It is important for lighting to have proper intensity, color temperature, and uniformity so that the provider is not mislead when making a diagnosis during the examination or procedure. The examination light may be used in multiple types of examinations and procedures; therefore, it is important for the design of the light to allow for the proper reach and positioning in order to illuminate any part of the body by the health care professional. It is equally important that once positioned, the light does not drift from this location, which can cause inconvenience especially when working in a sterile field. Examination lights with smaller product profiles are desirable as they assist in giving the provider better access to the patient.
Contemporary examination lights are generally not designed specifically for interaction with examination and procedure chairs and tables, limiting their effectiveness when used as a system. The contemporary exam lights are typically caster based, wall mounted, or ceiling mounted making them cumbersome for users and in some cases preventing accessibility to a patient. In other cases, these lights may assist in increasing room clutter.
Contemporary examination lights generally use halogen bulbs and fiber optic bundles that produce intense amounts of heat. Because of the halogen bulb, some lights require larger product envelopes. Furthermore, the halogen bulbs utilized in the contemporary lights generally offer only hundreds to a few thousand hours of life. Blown bulbs may be costly and inconvenient especially if the failure of the bulb occurs in the middle of an examination or procedure. Moreover, as these light sources are manipulated to adjust a spot size of the light, the spots generally lose intensity as the spot size is increased, having health care professionals choose between more intense light or a larger spot of light. Therefore there is a need in the art to improve the life of the light source without degrading light intensity would be a noticeable improvement.
Some examinations and procedures may be hours in duration. Heat generated from contemporary lamps can become uncomfortable for both the provider and patient. Some contemporary lamps attempt to place the light source in the base of the light, away from the provider and the patient, but these configurations then require transmitting the light from the base of the light to the lamp head as well as fans or other heat dissipation components which are a source of noise and add cost to the overall system. Therefore there is also a need in the art for a light that does not produce an abundance of heat over long periods of time.
Additionally, since it is likely the examination light could come into contact with different substances during the examination or procedure, the design of the light should provide some protection against the ingress of fluids. This also helps to ensure satisfactory operation of the light when cleaned with different disinfectants.